Society

If reports are true, Jeff Bezos’s penis is on the verge of going viral — waltzing off alone into the great unknown of cyberspace and there, under the glare of a billion eyeballs, having its power as an agent of chaos and shame amplified immeasurably. As you read this, you can be sure battalions of Bezos lawyers are working around the clock to keep the Bezos penis where it has hitherto always been: billeted, shrouded, presumably, in the comfortable privacy of mankind’s finest breathable linens. Good luck to them, for they will have their work cut out.

It was really only a matter of time before a men’s shaving company began virtue signaling about #MeToo and toxic masculinity. Welcome to the brave new world of ‘woke capital’ – Gillette and their cringeworthy ad is just the latest example. Their short film, which basically plays on familiar denunciations of guys as insufficiently sensitive, is all about showing how much Gillette cares about making the world a better place that is an absolute utopia full of neutered men. Of course, Gillette does not seem to care so much about...treating their workers with basic decency, but...details. Gillette is far from alone in their attempt to showcase their exquisite dignity and compassion.

The number of American adults who smoke has fallen to the lowest level ever recorded, a mere third of what it was 70 years ago. Decades of aggressive public health campaigns and advertising bans are responsible for this remarkable decline. As norms and mores changed, smoking became situated somewhere between bear baiting and regularly dining at Cracker Barrel as a form of utterly deviant behavior. Those who continue to smoke belong to the struggle towns and junklands of Middle America. They are usually adult men without much of an education, living below the poverty line; they are the very backbone of Trumpism.

This week, the star reporter of the German magazine Der Spiegel was fired after it was revealed that he had been fabricating stories for several years. Here, Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn expose the many inaccuracies in his article about their town, Fergus Falls, Minn. In February 2017, my husband and I attended a concert at our local theater, and were sipping some wine in the lobby before the show started. Several people came up to us at separate times excitedly, and asked, ‘did you meet the German guy yet?!’ I hadn’t, but my spider senses perked up when I heard that he worked for Der Spiegel, a magazine based in Hamburg, and that he was writing about the state of rural America in the wake of Trump’s presidency.

A couple of years ago, in high summer, my wife and I attended Mass in St Patrick’s Cathedral, as we do every time we visit New York. It is, in general, a bracing experience for Catholics who have been paddling in the tepid pools of Irish Catholicism. The celebrant, a middle-aged man with the physique and personality of a matinee idol, gave a startling sermon about the gospel of the day, Matthew 10:34, in which Jesus declares, ‘I have come to bring not peace but a sword.’ In his homily, the priest tore into sentimental notions of Christianity and the corruptions of concepts such as compassion and mercy.

Reading Andrew Sullivan reminds me of a Latin tag the novelist Iris Murdoch favored: corruptio optimi pessima: the corruption of the best is the worst. Sullivan is an intelligent and well educated man. He is capable of writing quite movingly about religion, especially about the challenges our media-saturated age — we really are, as T. S. Eliot put it, ‘distracted from distraction by distraction’ — pose to that reservoir of quiet thoughtfulness that any spiritual life worth the name requires. Back in 2012, Sullivan wrote a little paean to St Francis, a well-to-do young man, who sold everything he had and devoted himself to a life of poverty and renunciation, practices that Sullivan described as the ‘core’ of Jesus’s message.

If the Weekly Standard closes down by year’s end, as is widely expected and as Spectator USA first reported, the country will have lost one of its few remaining writer’s magazines. But for most people, the caliber of writing from Andrew Ferguson or Christopher Caldwell or Matt Labash is not what stands out about the Weekly Standard. Its reputation is tied to the Iraq War and to its founding editor’s reinvention of himself as the most acerbic NeverTrumper on Twitter. The latter has led the New York Times and other outlets to blame the closed-mindedness of conservatives toward criticism of Trump for the magazine’s demise.

It is very easy to hate Lena Dunham. Very easy. Trivially easy. There are men and women people find it easier to hate but most of them are lawyers, real estate agents and autocrats. Right-wingers hate her shrill commitment to ‘social justice’, her obsessive fangirling on behalf of Hillary Clinton, her incessant crassness, her habitual nudism and her smearing of an innocent man as a rapist. Left-wingers hate her apparent white privilege, her un-PC comments, her astonishing wealth and her defense of a friend who was accused of rape. The left and the right can bond over their mutual hatred of her ubiquity. ‘In an era of hyperpartisanship,’ said the left-wing writer Sean McElwee, ‘Lena Dunham’s ability to...

‘Your parents would be embarrassed by you,’ a masked woman said as she blocked me from walking into a downtown Portland Plaza. An antifa counter-protest was taking place. Joined by others, a group of black-clad masked individuals surrounded me. ‘You’re an Asian giving into white supremacy, motherfucker,’ one shouted. Why did I, a Vietnamese-American gay journalist, receive this reaction from a self-described anti-racist social justice movement? Because I tried to report honestly on antifa – the far-left movement of communists, socialists, and anarchists who agitate for revolution. Their M.O. is direct confrontation against their opponents by any means necessary, including violence.

The decision by the popular liberal podcast Pod Save America to break ties publicly with Tim Miller – a Republican adviser and Trump skeptic – might not make ripples beyond the beltway. It’s an interesting story nonetheless. In a strangely sanctimonious statement posted on Twitter, Pod’s co-hosts – three ex-Obama staffers – announced they would be dropping Miller, a regular guest, because of his links with the lobbying firm Definers Public Affairs. They 'ultimately found it impossible to square that work with the values of our company’. Definers – for those who missed it – is currently caught up in a media storm regarding some advisory work it had been doing for Facebook.

By now, it’s clear to most American Catholics that our Holy Father just doesn’t like us. While most laypeople assumed his ‘rigidity’ slur was aimed at the legions of young people who are returning to the Latin Mass. Nope: most bishops know he’s talking about the Yanks. He calls the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’s conservative majority, like the saintly and learned Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia, right-wing ideologues. His senior advisers accuse Catholic conservatives of engaging in an ‘ecumenism of hate’ with Evangelical Protestants. Sure: Pope Francis cottoned to a few bishops.

So, here’s a proposition — an idea, a notion that might be worth exploring: the computer revolution has saved the small city. Four decades into the digitizing of our lives, some of the unintended and unexpected consequences of computerization are coming clear. And one of those consequences may be the possibilities for success found by some small Midwestern cities. The truly great cities of the nation — New York, Los Angeles — are among the most powerful economic engines ever created. The computer revolution proved to be jet fuel for the economics that brought them out of the doldrums of the 1970s. The large Rust Belt cities — Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit — have either succeeded or failed to find a way out of the collapse of American manufacturing.

Regional inequality is perhaps one of the hardest social issues America faces – the sense that a select few prosperous metropolitan areas increasingly dominate the rest of the country economically, culturally, and politically. Every election, the consequences of this inequality become more evident; it was crucial in electing Donald Trump president in 2016. When Amazon announced last year that it would embark on a mission to find its next headquarters, the (naive) hope was that by spreading around its largesse, some of this inequality could be stemmed. From Birmingham, Alabama to Pittsburgh, cities were teased with the prospect of a once-in-a-lifetime influx of economic stimulus.

Today the Catholic bishops of the United States are in Baltimore to begin their three-day annual general assembly. Security is tight, and protesters are expected outside the conference hotel. Inside, few are making any attempt to pretend that it is business as usual for the Church. Months of scandals have reignited a sexual abuse crisis that many of the bishops hoped they had laid to rest a decade and a half ago. This time, it is the bishops themselves, rather than the rank and file priests, who are in the firing line.

The tech sector, we are forever being told, has a gender problem. Recently, for example, Women in Technology International reported that only a quarter of US information technology workers are women – something which it was quick to claim was a result of ‘unconscious bias’. How else, it invited us to ask ourselves, can the proportion of women in technology be so low when women receive 57 percent of college degrees and nearly half of professional degrees in law, medicine, and the physical sciences? Worse, we are led to think, the bias is inbred in the machines themselves.

The British edition of GQ is 30 years old and, to celebrate its birthday, it is conducting a ‘dissection of masculinity’. I can’t help feeling that’s a bit of a shame – if a men’s magazine won’t celebrate masculinity, who will?  – but fear not. The male gender still has one unapologetic champion – step forward Canadian psychology professor Dr Jordan Peterson – and, as part of this promotional push, GQ sent Helen Lewis to interview him. Those hoping for a re-run of Peterson’s famous encounter with Cathy Newman, the Channel 4 News presenter, will be disappointed. Peterson comes out on top, of course, but Lewis, the deputy editor of the New Statesman, is better prepared than Newman.